Who is watching me? Disentangling audience and interpersonal closeness effects in a Pay-What-You-Want context

Elisa Hofmann, Michael E. Fiagbenu, Asri Özgümüs, Amir M. Tahamtan and Tobias Regner

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2021, vol. 90, issue C

Abstract: We disentangle by means of a laboratory experiment two relevant drivers of voluntary payments in Pay-What-You-Want settings: the effects of interpersonal closeness and an audience. Our 2×2 between-subjects design varies the interpersonal closeness of buyers and the observability of their payments by other buyers. This allows us to enrich the research on both drivers and identify whether the presence of close others (closeness effect), payment observability (audience effect), or the combination of both affects voluntary payments. We find that both effects separately are sufficient to increase voluntary payments. Payments are, on average, higher if they are observed by an audience and if buyers are acquainted with each other. While the effect of audience and interpersonal closeness on payments is additive in total, we do not find an interaction effect, if payments are observed by close others.

Keywords: Social preferences; Experiments; Social image concerns; Pay-What-You-Want; Interpersonal closeness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804320306741
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:90:y:2021:i:c:s2214804320306741

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2020.101631

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().